ELENA PAPANIKOLAKIS
’PARTING WORDS’
24 MAY – 30 JUNE, 2018
Elena Papanikolakis, Parting Words, installation view. 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Parting Words presents new works comprising collage, text and painting.
The works in the exhibition explore the realm of departures, from the finality of death, to deviations from context, form and function. It considers departures in terms of distance or removal from people, places, ideas and culture; to aberrations, and diversions between message and meaning.
Elena Papanikolakis, Parting Words, installation view. 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
Elena Papanikolakis, Parting Words, installation view. 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
Drawing from a broad range of personal and found materials, the works in Parting Words explore the breadth and implications of archives whilst delving into remnants of personal and cultural history. There is no demarcation in the works between personal and found material, with boundaries between the two merged, blurred and overlapped.
Elena Papanikolakis, Parting Words, installation view. 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
In spite of this, works in the exhibition seek to dually engage with information and abstraction, that is- to engage with meaning whilst challenging modes of comprehension. This is considered through plays around photographic proof and the communicative function of language and engaging with how painting can operate in the space between figuration and abstraction.
Elena Papanikolakis, Parting Words, installation view. 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
Thought is given to exploring the modes and structures that scaffold information, such as book pages. Working with the book page format presented opportunities to give structure to and formalise abstracted information, and explore the relationship between, and expectations of images and text.
Elena Papanikolakis, Parting Words, installation view. 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
Elena Papanikolakis, Parting Words, installation view. 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
At the core of the installation is a house shaped from a number of strategically hung vertical blinds that are motorised so they are constantly opening and closing. The blinds are made of mirror tint film whose dual transparent and reflective properties creates multiple layers and fractured reflections that warp the viewers’ sense of depth and perception of self and are used to explore the experience of ‘in-between-ness’—a dream-like state one encounters when they are in a space of being neither here nor there.
Elena Papanikolakis, Parting Words, installation view. 2018. Photography by Document Photography.